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Agreed! It sure feels like HAL (https://henryherz.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/05-robots-hal....)

I thought there was a similar style in Star Trek: The Original Series, but while they had card-loaded computers, it wasn't as an array of cards. Their hardware idiom is more like http://tosgraphics.yuku.com/topic/409/The-Type7-Console-Comp...

ST:TNG has an example at http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/b/bd/... but I suspect it was more directly derived from HAL than a 1960s era computer.



It's carried over into modern sci-fi. Check out these pictures from Stargate SG-1 (which is what first popped into my mind when I saw those photos):

http://en.stargate-wiki.org/wiki/images/b/b7/Tel%27tak_contr...

http://en.stargate-wiki.org/wiki/images/c/c0/Ha%27tak_Auxili...

http://en.stargate-wiki.org/wiki/File:Ha%27tak_Glider_bay_do...

I'd love to talk to set designers on these shows to find out what their influences were. I would not be at all surprised if these kinds of props originate in the Daisy Bell scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I would bet any money that set in 2001 was an extrapolation of the SMS card.


Here's a "logic module" from ST:Enterprise - http://www.startrekpropauthority.com/2011/10/star-trek-enter... . It's apparently from "In A Mirror, Darkly", where the Terrans from the mirror universe acquired the Constitution-class Federation starship USS Defiant. So it's definitely an homage to the 1960s series.

At some point it's hard to know the specific lineage. Consider "Land of the Lost" from the 1970s, which had a control panel of colored crystals: http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20150109000245/villains/i...

They are colored crystals in an array, though unlike the scene from 2001 and the Babylon 5 images you found, these are not slotted.

I'm pretty certain there's a book or web site somewhere which goes into the details of the design sense of at Star Trek.




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